Tense and Aspect in Obolo Grammar and Discourse


Book Description

Describes comprehensively and systematically the function of tense and aspect in the Obolo language (southeastern coastal Nigeria).




Tense and Aspect in Obolo Grammar and Discourse


Book Description

Describes comprehensively and systematically the function of tense and aspect in the Obolo language (southeastern coastal Nigeria).




Tense in English


Book Description

First published in 1991, this book looks at tense in English, one of the most controversial areas of grammar. Prior to the book’s original publication, the problems and interest in the subject had led to an impressive number of books and articles. Yet, despite the amount of work produced, nothing approaching a consensus had emerged, merely a series of conflicting theories and analyses. Here, Renaat Declerck provides a framework for a theoretical instrument which will enable the linguist to interpret the data correctly. The book is primarily theoretical in nature, but offers descriptive theory and a discussion of the various tenses which will make it a valuable tool for those teaching English. Theoretical and applied linguists will find this an important contribution to the debate on tense and a worthy starting point for future research. The book is not written from the viewpoint of any particular linguistic theory and does not presuppose any knowledge of tense theory, it is a readable and reliable guide to the area.




The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect


Book Description

Tense and aspect are means by which language refers to time--how an event takes place in the past, present, or future. They play a key role in understanding the grammar and structure of all languages, and interest in them reaches across linguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible guide to the topics and theories that currently form the front line of research into tense, aspect, and related areas. The volume contains 36 chapters, divided into 6 sections, written by internationally known experts in theoretical linguistics.




Time and the Verb


Book Description

This guide provides the reader with a broad perspective of grammar, from classical Greek and Latin to the latest proposals in formal semantics.







Tense and Aspect - The Past Perfect


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Würzburg, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction: Tense and aspect A foreign learner of the English language has to struggle with many tasks concerning vocabulary and grammar. Especially the correct usage of the verb phrase includes a highly difficult problem and has to be analysed very detailed. It includes not only the grammatical category of tense but as well the category of aspect, mood and voice. This paper is supposed to concentrate on the grammatical categories tense and aspect. Tense is used to express the location of an event or state in time. It can be divided into future, present and past tense. By contrast to that “aspect” expresses the way in which the action or the state is experienced. It reflects the meaning of the verb in relation to time. That means it shows whether the action is finished or is still in progress. The English verb system includes the perfective aspect, the progressive aspect, the simple aspect and the perfect-progressive aspect. (Quirk et al. 1979: 40) In the following an overview of the tense past combined with the perfective aspect will be given. First of all the definitions of this tense and aspect will be compared in three different grammars: “Meaning and the English Verb” by Leech, “A Student’s Grammar of the English Language” by Quirk and Greenbaum and “Longman Student Grammar of spoken and written English” by Biber et al.. In the second part of the paper the application of the past perfect will be analysed in an excerpt of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” written by Joanne K. Rowling.




A Grammar of Contemporary Igbo


Book Description

In twenty-five chapters this book covers phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. The chapters are organized in four discrete parts: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. They are uneven in terms of scope covered, length, the density of their contents and their degrees of difficulty. Each chapter ends with ‘Some References’ relevant to both the topic(s) treated in the chapter, in Igbo linguistics, and in general linguistics.




The Past Tense System in English and Romanian


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Linguistic Typology and Language Universals, language: English, abstract: As Martin Haase points out, the term ‘tense’ in any given language can hardly be isolated. In a broader context, it usually consists of an interwoven system, the so-called Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM). English and Romanian are no exception. Haase states that “it is far from simple to attribute TAM-categories clearly to either tense, aspect or mood, since most categories contain a temporal as well as an aspectual or modal meaning.” (Haase, 1994:135). In order not to go beyond the intended scope of this analysis, I will thus straightforwardly compare English and Romanian past tenses, thereby avoiding a detailed discussion on the inner TAM workings of each language, as this could easily fill entire books on its own. Nonetheless, when absolutely necessary, I will include mood and aspect since both of them cannot be entirely ignored in an analysis about time-related utterances. My main concern, however, is to illustrate the general differences of the tense systems rather than to consider all the exceptions that follow in their wake. Thus, before explaining the construction of the main past tenses, I will provide a short overview and definition of the terms tense, aspect and mood in the English and Romanian language.




On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar


Book Description

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.